Silly songs

I stopped listening to popular music around the mid-1970s or so. While the 60s and early 70s had some great music, it was also a time when some very silly songs managed to get air time on the radio. Recently, while cooking, the chorus of one such old song popped into my mind and I started singing it. My daughter and son-in-law who were present were incredulous that such a song could possibly have been made let alone become somewhat popular and accused me of making it up on the spur of the moment. So I gave them proof.

Here it is.

Violent and unnecessary repression of students and faculty

The student protests over what is happening in Gaza have spread all over the country with nearly 2,000 arrests made at over 40 campuses. You can see a map of the nationwide protests. The harshest crackdown seems to have been in New York City where the mayor Eric Adams (a former police chief) and the university president of Columbia Nemat Shafik unleashed a massive assault on the protestors, throwing them to the ground and tying their hands with zip ties and arresting many students and faculty. Adams justified his harsh tactics by saying that the protests had been infiltrated by ‘outside agitators’ but when pressed by reporters to give numbers, was highly evasive, suggesting that he was lying.

Reporter Natasha Lennard that while she has often seen violent police responses to protests, this one was unhinged, and that the justifications for it was ludicrous.
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The problem of maintaining humanistic societies

Humanism is an idea that, like so many philosophical concepts, is hard to pin down. If asked whether I am a humanist, I would say yes, but would struggle to come up with a clean definition. If pressed, I would probably say something along the lines that I believe that humanism privileges feeling solidarity with fellow humans and values a sense of shared humanity that takes precedence over allegiances based on things like race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and the like.

In her book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (2023) Sarah Bakewell acknowledges that humanism resists sharp definition and indeed humanists tend to avoid creeds of any kind since a creed itself tends to separate people, from those who adhere to the creed to those who don’t. Her book instead gives a series of brief biographies of people down the ages who seemed to consider themselves to be humanists of various stripes and discusses what drove them.
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Academic freedom under threat

The student protests on college campuses against the horrors taking place in Gaza have been largely peaceful and taken the form of setting up encampments in college open spaces and holding demonstrations and making speeches. In response, some universities have responded with inexcusably harsh repressive measures, sending in armed riot police and even snipers to break up the protests and the encampments and arrest students and faculty. It is as if they have not learned the lessons of the anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid protests of past decades where this kind of authoritarian response resulted in strengthening student resolve with even more universities joining in solidarity.

Sarah D. Phillips, a professor at Indiana University, was shocked by the harshness of the police response to peaceful protests and she herself was arrested simply for being there. But she says that the faculty are outraged and calling for the resignation of the president and provost, and that the students are undeterred.

I am a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, where I was arrested this past weekend. After receiving social-media messages reporting a heavy police presence at a student rally, I rushed to the public gathering space on campus known as Dunn Meadow. There I saw my students among unarmed peaceful protesters. I saw state police in riot gear approaching them with batons. I saw still more police toting assault rifles. I could not believe my eyes. A few moments later, I had a riot shield pressed against my face. I was forced to the ground and told to roll onto my stomach. My wrists were cuffed tightly behind my back. I looked to my left — there was my student, likewise prone, battered, and cuffed. I looked to my right — another student, prone, battered, and cuffed.
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